The Canterbury Sisters (14 page)

Okay, now she’s definitely going to ask me what’s wrong,
I think.
Nothing opens the door to feminine confession like tears—we’ll run across a bathroom to ask a weeping stranger if everything is okay,
and when she does ask what’s wrong, what am I supposed to tell her? That I’m crying over
Cinderella
or my father’s coffin, or the fact that they bind the feet of little girls in China? Of all the women who could have found me like this, why does it have to be her?

But she doesn’t even look at me. The silence stretches between us, grows ever more awkward, until finally I slide my foot in my boot and limp up the street, like some absurd actor in a spaghetti western. It hurts, but as I progress I find myself walking faster and faster, tripping over my shoelaces, dragging them across the mossy cobblestones, clenching my toes in an effort to keep the boots on. By the time I am back at the inn, I am almost running to get away from Valerie and the empty silence of that square.

Seven

W
e don’t want to break the rules, but we’re breaking the rules,” Silvia says, with a bark of a laugh. It’s the next morning and we are barely twenty steps into our walk, the village still sleeping over our shoulder. “We’ve talked it over. Claire is going first.”

“I know that Tess told us hearts should go before diamonds,” Claire says. The sun hits her perfectly composed blonde hair like light bouncing off a helmet, and the cashmere turtleneck of the day is a color that looks black at first but on deeper study reveals itself to be a muted slate gray. “And I’m sure she’s right. But in this case it really shouldn’t matter which of us goes first, because our stories are so similar.”

“Similar?” says Silvia. “I should think they’re quite the opposite.”

I should think they’re quite the opposite
? Well, shit, let’s all have crumpets and tea. Silvia must be one of those people who’s cursed to go through life picking up the accents and speech patterns of anyone she meets. I shouldn’t judge, for I’m a bit that way myself. Put me in a cab with a Pakistani driver and I exit it singing, “And thank you too, kind sir.” I try to fight the tendency—I’m always afraid it will seem like I’m mocking the other person—but it’s a struggle. Just two days in the British countryside and I’m already adding those little upticks of questions to the ends of my sentences. “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” I said to the girl who was serving breakfast at the inn, automatically cushioning my definitive American statements with the soft cotton of British consensus-making.

“But opposites are similar, at least in the heart,” Claire is saying. “Haven’t you ever noticed that? When Silvia and I were talking over breakfast this morning, we realized our stories covered the same theme. Faithfulness. What it is and how it changes over time.”

“These stories are all too complicated,” Becca says. She tends to be congested and phlegmy in the morning, I’ve noticed, and her voice is just on the edge of a whine.

“Love is complicated,” her mother tells her. “Life is complicated.”

“No, it isn’t,” Becca says, with the confidence of the young and untested. “Or at least it doesn’t have to be. Is it really that hard to tell a plain and simple love story?”

Crickets.

“You can tell a simple love story when it’s your turn,” I finally say. “Bring out the unicorns and rainbows and make it as sweet as you want.”

“I didn’t say sweet,” Becca says, and her pitch goes even higher, cutting the morning air. She’s wearing the most bizarre combination of colors today—a cherry hoodie, brown pants, neon-green socks. It isn’t just the casual mismatching of a girl who dressed in haste. It takes effort to look this bad. What we are witnessing is an orchestrated bedlam. A deliberate and conscious assault on the retina. “Sweet sucks. I mean happy. Sexy. Do any of you even remember sexy?”

“But my story is quite sexy,” Claire says. She says it smoothly, her answer damping down Becca’s rudeness, smothering it completely, like a thick towel over a grease fire, and Jean smiles at her in gratitude. I feel for Jean. Having Becca for a daughter must be like living with one of those low-rent boyfriends every woman dates at some point in her life—the kind where you enter every social event with a stone in your chest, just waiting for that inevitable moment when he makes a stupid joke or insults your hostess or says something about politics. “But it is rather complicated, and thus you may not like it, Becca dear. I wouldn’t have liked it when I was your age.”

“Don’t equivocate,” says Silvia. “Don’t apologize or explain. Just leap right into the middle of the action. The way you always do.”

Claire laughs. “I’ve been married four times, as you all know, and I live with a younger man now. But this story isn’t about him. This story goes all the way back to my third husband. I was just shy of forty years old when it happened. You know, forty. That dangerous, dangerous age. That year in which everything you’ve built to that point suddenly cracks and turns to dust in your hands. Are any of you close to forty?”

She glances at me, which is flattering, because I’m actually pretty far past it. Up until last week I would have said “safely past it.” If I had to guess anyone else in the group was looking down the barrel of this particular gun, it would be Valerie. And possibly Steffi, although no, she’s more likely still somewhere in the middle of that long nap known as a woman’s thirties, along with Angelique. Tess is younger, and of course Becca is younger yet, while Claire, Silvia, and Jean are all in their late fifties or better. I stop and try to sequence us in my mind. Silvia, Claire, Jean, Che, Valerie, Steffi, Angelique, Tess, and Becca—that’s how I would line us up if I had to, with me more or less in the middle of the pack, just as I always seem to be. But I could be wrong. So many factors come into play in how well a woman wears her age—money, nationality, weight, posture, Botox, luck.

“As a matter of fact I turned forty just last week,” Valerie says.

“Did you?” Claire says. “Happy birthday, and get ready for your whole life to fall to shit, if it hasn’t already. I’d just turned forty in the story I’m about to tell you, and I felt safe at the beginning of it, so safe that I couldn’t imagine how everything was about to—heavens, what is that?”

Tess’s gaze follows Claire’s pointing finger to the path ahead. “It’s an apple orchard. Surely you have them in the States.”

“No, of course I’ve seen an orchard,” Claire says, pausing and pushing up her oversize sunglasses to the top of her head. “It just surprised me. We’ve been walking in the land of beer for so long and now, boom, we turn the corner and here we are in the land of apples. That’s wonderful.”

The orchard before us is enormous, with rows upon rows of neatly planted trees, and a number of the branches are still heavy with fruit. This surprises me. I would have guessed the time for harvest was long past, but it’s warm today . . . the fifties rising into the sixties if you measure temperature the American way, which all of us do. When Tess had cheerfully announced “We’ll be hitting seventeen by afternoon,” back over breakfast, at first we had thought she was talking miles, which was bad enough, but then we’d realized she was talking temperature and we really winced. Seventeen sounds so damn cold. But now we’ve been walking no more than thirty minutes and most of us have already taken off our coats. They dangle from the tops of our backpacks or are tied around our waists, and we will give them to Tim when we stop for lunch. One of the advantages of having the van meet us at whatever pub Tess chooses is that we can change socks and bandages, and remove our outerwear as the temperature rises.

“Well, turning forty is just like this,” Claire says. “A shift in the climate, the tiniest movement of the sun within the clouds, a bend in the road, and suddenly, just like magic, the whole world looks different.” She lowers her glasses, takes one of those deep cleansing breaths like they teach you in yoga, and we all begin to walk.

 The Tale of Claire 

“When a woman has moved as often as I have she becomes expert in the art of packing and unpacking,” Claire begins, once we’ve all settled into our pace. “My third husband’s name was Adam, which would probably be a better name for a first husband, but there you have it. He was a college professor with what seemed like a hundred boxes of books, and books are the worst things to move, any professional will tell you that. Adam was hopeless at helping. He would begin to unpack a box and then he’d just stop and pull out a particular volume and start to explain all about it. The story, if it was a novel, or how he’d come to own the book, if it was nonfiction, and thus he suspected the topic would be over my head. Almost everything was over my head, at least according to Adam. We were just a few months in but I was already beginning to have my doubts about him.”

“You looked scared in those wedding pictures,” Silvia says.

“I look scared in all my wedding pictures,” Claire says. “Show me a bride who doesn’t look scared and I’ll show you a bride who’s drunk. But anyway, Adam was no help at unpacking, and in fact he was making things worse. So after the first morning of enduring his lectures, I told him to just forget it, to go back to campus, and that I would handle the rest. I was very nearly at the end when I found the box with the videotape. Yes, a videotape, and that was the first clue. Even at the time, VHS was going out of fashion. Almost everyone had switched to DVDs by then, so I asked myself, ‘Whatever is this?’ and then I saw that bit of masking tape and that single word:
Edith.
”

“Edith?” Becca says, with a crinkle of her nose. “No one’s named Edith anymore, not even people your age.”

“Exactly,” says Claire. She appears to be expert at not being insulted, able to divert a barbed arrow just before it hits, moving so deftly that even the shooter forgets she’s taken the shot. I suppose it’s the legacy of having been married so many times. “Edith was Adam’s wife before me. And just as you say, Becca, it’s such a plain name, such an old-fashioned name . . .” She shrugs. “But it suited her. The two of them had been married for almost twenty years and she was the mother of his children. The proper faculty-wife sort, all about charity and committees and dinner parties. I know the type to a T, because all four of my husbands were married to the exact same woman just before they married me.” She laughs. She laughs automatically, just the way the close-cropped man back at the bar claimed that Americans smile, and yet the sound is clear and melodic. A bell, not a bellow, and I envy her yet again.

“For this is my destiny,” Claire says, “to follow in sequence behind the Ediths of the world, and I knew without thinking that I was holding a tape of their wedding. It chafed me. Adam and I had been married in Lake Tahoe, in one of those five-minute ceremonies, and he had been quite insistent that it would be just the two of us. No one else there, not even his children. He tried to present it as madcap and romantic, but it felt like we were sneaking off. Like he was ashamed of me.”

“That’s the only one of your weddings I missed,” Silvia said.

“I sent you a picture.”

“It’s on my refrigerator with a magnet.”

“Still?”

Silvia nods. “I never take anything off my refrigerator. It’s my personal time capsule. That’s how I know you look scared in the picture. But there’s a nice view of Lake Tahoe in the background.”

“Tahoe’s perfectly grand,” says Claire. “The problem wasn’t Tahoe.”

“If Edith had been his wife that long ago, I’m surprised he even had a tape of their wedding,” Steffi says. “People didn’t use videographers back then, did they? At least not like they do today.” A valid point, and I guess it’s not surprising she would have been the one to do the math and find the first flaw in Claire’s narrative. She’s always counting something.

“Excellent,” Claire says. “Good for you, Steffi. You’re far more clever than I was. I just assumed that the tape I was holding in my hands was twenty years old, but in truth it was no more than two or three. But that didn’t strike me at the time, and besides, I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is I was so sure that I’d found a video of Adam’s first wedding that no other possibility crossed my mind. We didn’t have a VHS player in the house and so I stuck it back in a drawer and told myself I’d look at it later.”